Jeremiah Wood

327 pages

Water Arnold lived a lifestyle many of us could only dream of, surviving in the backwoods of Maine, testing his skills against Mother Nature and harvesting furbearers for a good part of his annual income. In these pages, we look back on the stories that made Arnold a household name among outdoors folk across America.

Trapping writer and editor Jeremiah Wood selected these 29 stories after taking a deep dive into a half-dozen boxes of Arnold’s personal papers, his journal, correspondence and all of the published Arnold stories in the Special Collections department at the University of Maine Fogler Library. The stories include true wilderness adventure, trapping and lure making instruction, keen observations about nature and the personal reflections of one of the Last Mountain Men.

“It was almost as if they’d been there all those years, waiting for someone to bring them back to life.”